Sunday, 27 November 2011

At Ronimo Games we make lots of stuff that is never released or shown outside our office. Kind of a pity, really, because quite a lot of that is really cool! So I am really happy that today I can show one of the cancelled projects that I personally like most: the insane mockup trailer we made in May 2009 for Monster Truck VS Zombies!

This is a pitch video we did for a big mobile publisher (can't say who, since that's confidential). They wanted fresh games for something, and in a couple of days we came up with a concept, made concept art and produced a pitch video to show all of that.

This was to be a really small game, so we came up with a slightly simpler concept than what you usually see from Ronimo. The idea was to make a side-scrolling stunt-driving game, much like Excite Bike and Trials. You drive a giant monster truck and the goal is to kill zombies through stunt kills. After each level you can buy upgrades and weapons for your truck and driver. But really, the video says at all, so just have a look:

The music is Sad Man's Tonque by Volbeat. Since this is just a pitch video and not an actual product, we used an existing song that fits the game.

The art in this video was of course made by our art team, but I got lucky and could animate the gameplay sequence in the middle (the part with the stick figures ;) ) and do the video montage. Since I am lead programmer at Ronimo, it rarely works to let me do art things: it is impractical for our planning and our artists are way better at it than I am. However, I really enjoy the rare moments when there is an opportunity for me to do some 3D art, animation or lighting! :)

As far as pitch-videos for new concepts go, I think this is a pretty good one. I think it communicates both the style and the actual gameplay pretty well. Through the choice of music and the logo and concept art, it gives a good feel for how the player will experience it.

The gameplay mock-up video in the middle shows what the actual gameplay will be. We deliberately made this with stick figures, so that it is absolutely clear that this is not the graphical style the game would have. Since we wanted to make this video in only a couple of days, trying to show what the real graphics would look like in the final game during gameplay would not have worked: it is simply too much work to make that on a high enough quality level. In practice, it is always difficult for a viewer to look beyond mediocre graphics and realise that the real game is going to look better. So I think if you want to pitch something, it is a good idea to make things either look/play absolutely fantastic, or make it super clear that only parts of what you are seeing represent the final product.

So since the gameplay animation didn't show the graphical style of the game, our artists instead made two concept art pieces for that. One is the 'standard' concept art image. It features the main elements of the game and looks as cool as possible:

However, this kind of concept art is not very useful for anything but setting the mood and character. At no point in the game will you play anything that looks even remotely like this. After all, the game itself is side-scrolling and shows the monster truck from quite a distance.

This is a pitfall that lots of concept artists seem to fall for. How often does a concept artist design a character specifically to look good from the front, even though the game is third person, so you look at his back all the time? So at Ronimo our artists mostly make concept art from exactly the perspective of the actual game. So when we decide on a style or design, we decide based on what things will actually look like in the game. So for Monster Truck VS Zombies, our artists also drew an image of what the actual game would look like in the end:

Monster Truck VS Zombies was cancelled and nothing was ever made for it besides this trailer. So what went wrong with this game? A couple of things. First: the publisher didn't like it, so there was no financing. Then there was the platform: we had never worked with that mobile device before, so doing a new device was going to make the coding team too much of a bottleneck. Especially since I was still the only programmer at the time.

Finally, and this killed a lot of the enthusiasm in our team for this project: we discovered a Flash game that was almost exactly the same. A side-scrolling stunt-racer where you kill zombies with a monster truck. That Flash game was so badly made that it was no fun at all, but still, seeing something so literally the same is far from inspiring. We always try to make something that is at least slightly original and innovative, and this wasn't that any more after we saw that video.

Anyway, I still really like this little over-the-top pitch video for Monster Truck VS Zombies, so it is really nice to finally show it here! :)

Saturday, 19 November 2011

Awesomenauts and Swords & Soldiers are both 2D games that have been designed for high resolution HD screens. So how do they look on old CRT televisions with their low SD resolutions? The obvious answer seems to be that they should automatically look great: the art is super crisp, because it was designed for a higher resolution. However, what you may not realise, is that too crisp is not a good thing!

The problem lies in anti-aliasing, and in graphical details. Anything that the artists have drawn that is only 1 pixel wide in HD, will start to flicker on an SD screen. This happens for the simple reason that not every pixel will be shown on an SD TV. The art has been made for 1920x1080 pixels on the screen, and only 720x576 of those will be shown on an SD television. As a character moves over the screen, his details will flicker in and out of view as they are sometimes on a pixel, and sometimes in between two pixels.

This is especially problematic for anti-aliasing: in a 2D game, anti-aliasing of edges is drawn in Photoshop and doesn't require any work from the game. But on an SD television, the pixels that make the anti-aliasing may fall in between two screen pixels, meaning that anti-aliasing is often entirely lost.

(Note that this is a problem that is specific to 2D games: in 3D mipmapping is used to solve this problem, and anti-aliasing is rendered in real-time by the videocard.)

So when we render our HD 2D graphics to an SD television, they look noisy and too crisp. Now how do we solve that?

The solution is actually pretty simple. To get an image that is both smooth and sharp in SD, we use an easy trick in both Awesomenauts and Swords & Soldiers: on SD televisions, the game is rendered at a higher resolution than what is shown on the screen, and then sampled back to the lower screen resolution. This is a standard technique in non real-time rendering and is called supersampling.

So first we render the game at a higher resolution (1080x864 instead of 720x576). Then this high resolution image is rendered to the screen by sampling the area beneath each screen pixel. For each screen pixel, I take four samples from the high resolution image and use the average of that. This way really small details are not lost. Instead, they become more subtle, since they are averaged with the pixels around them.

So what resolution do we use for the high resolution image that we sample from? Easiest would be to use twice the screen resolution, but that requires rendering at 1440x1152, which is really high and wastes a lot of performance. I experimented a bit, and it turns out that rendering at 1.5 times the resolution is already enough to get smooth graphics.

This is a good thing, because twice times the resolution does tend to become quite expensive. In fact, at some point SD TVs had a lower framerate than 720p HD TVs, which is why I started experimenting with the exact resolutions to find a better trade-off between performance and quality. At 1.5 times the resolution, the framerate is smooth again.

The results look good, and they mean that I don't have to bother with storing all textures on different resolutions for HD and SD televisions, which keeps our art pipeline simple.

This post may seem to be about a really minor detail, but on old SD televisions, this really makes a big difference. Without this technique, both Swords & Soldiers and Awesomenauts didn't look good on low resolutions.

I find it really interesting that if you want to make a quality game, you really need to worry about all kinds of seemingly small details. All those little things in coding, art, sound and design are what makes a game polished, and this post has been about just one little example of the kind of polishing we do on our games.

Next week, I expect to have something really cool to show here, so see you then! ^_^

Sunday, 6 November 2011

It is common knowledge among modern game designers that you have to prototype your game designs early and often. Yet when you do that, you usually don't have any art to put in your prototypes yet: the art team has probably also only just started development. Some game designers might say this is actually a good thing: your game design should be fun even when played with just coloured squares or simple icons, so you should start there and only add art and sound once the abstract core gameplay is fun. I used to agree with that in most cases, but during development of Awesomenauts, I learned that working from such abstract prototypes can also steer your design in certain directions, which is not always an improvement.

What really made me realise this is the jumping mechanics in Awesomenauts. Since we didn't have any art for this new game yet at that point, we made the very first gameplay prototypes for Awesomenauts using characters from Swords & Soldiers. However, these characters don't have any jumping animations, since Swords & Soldiers doesn't feature any jumping.

Now at some point our game designers wanted to add some weight to the movements of the characters, so they proposed that the characters would need to really push off the ground when jumping, and really land after a jump instead of immediately continuing to walk. Since we didn't have any art for this yet, I implemented this by simply adding a short pause before jumping and after landing. So when you press jump, the character takes 0.5 seconds before going up, and after landing he pauses 0.5 seconds before continuing to walk.

In terms of pure game mechanics, this is the entire thing. The only difference between this and what would be in the final game, is that these 0.5 seconds pauses would have specific animations for pushing off and landing. So in terms of abstract game prototyping, this was a complete prototype with all the mechanics in it.

Yet is played horribly: it simply felt like the game's controls were slow and lagging behind, not like the character had more weight and presence in the world. So we threw out the pauses after a couple of short internal playtests.

At this point I realised that the reason these pauses felt bad was not that the mechanic in itself was wrong. The reason it felt bad was that there were no animations. If there is no animations, then the 0.5 seconds pause before jumping is simply a delay on your controls. You press the jump button and nothing happens for a little while. Yet when there are animations, something does happen immediately: the character bends through his knees and pushes off the ground. The delay between pressing the button and moving up is the same with and without animation, yet the feedback is way better when there is animation, because the character immediately reacts to your button press, even though he doesn't immediately start moving up.

To me this was an interesting realisation: it is not always possible to use abstract prototyping to see whether a mechanic works! Sometimes you need proper art and animations to know whether the gameplay is any good.

Note that in this case, squashing the character before and after a jump would already have been a big improvement, because this way at least the graphical feedback would have been immediate.

So the prototype was not a good enough test. But was not having these extra animations a good choice? I still think it was: Awesomenauts is a very fast skill-based game and quick and direct controls are incredibly important, so we would have wanted immediate jumping anyway. So despite the incomplete test, I definitely think we made the right choice.

Of course, this is totally different for each game: for a game like Assassin's Creed, the subtle animations really make the game, and make it feel like the character is really climbing those walls and has real weight. So it really depends on the game whether the delay that is added by in-between animations is a good thing or not.

So whether you have animations in your prototype or not greatly influences the core feel of your gameplay. The same applies to many other assets. Here are a couple of examples of situations where prototyping with or without sound and graphics can make a big difference on what the conclusions of the prorotype are:

-Games are way more fun with sound. Half the intensity and thrill you feel while playing a game comes from the audio. However, often sound designers are contracted rather late in development, so you usually don't have the real sound effects during the first half of development. For Swords & Soldiers, we fixed this in an easy way: we simply copied the sound effects from Warcraft III and used those temporarily. As soon as the real sound effects by Sonic Picnic were created, we threw out all the Warcraft III sound effects. But until that time, we had a much better feel for the actual game, because we actually had any sound at all.

-When looking for the right style of music for a game, a common quick prototyping method is to simply put on the music outside the game and then start playing to see whether it feels right. This is of course a good idea, but it also influences the attachment between the music and the game negatively. The problem is that the timing of the music is not linked to the game when you do this, because you have to start the track outside the game. It works much better if the music is started at the exact same time as a level, because now the music is not part of everything outside the game any more. I noticed this with several games now: music never really feels right until the timing of starting and stopping the music is right. Adding this timing to a prototype is usually really simple and helps a lot.

-A really obvious example is guns in a shooter. The most important thing for a gun in a shooter is that it feels right and has serious impact. Since 80% of the feeling of impact for a gun comes from the graphics and the sound, and only 20% from the actual gameplay and damage of the gun, it is impossible to really prototype guns if you don't add any audio and visuals. However, creating those well is a lot of work, so I guess you have to start without, but until you have sound, I don't think you can really tell whether a certain concept for a gun is an awesome idea or not.

-The Aztec Sun Giant and the Viking Frost Hammer in Swords & Soldiers are rather similar soldiers in terms of abstract game design: slow, specialist units that deal area of effect damage and shortly put the enemy out of battle (through respectively knockback and stun). When playing the game without graphics, one might conclude that they are too similar, except for their large difference in price and health. So maybe more variation is needed? No, not really: when the art is added, these two units feel really unique and different, making them work really well in the game. Again, prototyping without art might not have been a good idea for these two units.

The most important realisation from this whole topic is that the prototyping method greatly determines the outcome. Prototyping gameplay with or without graphics and audio gives different conclusions about which mechanics work, and it is important to realise that this is the case. Of course, I am absolutely in favour of prototyping early and often, even if you don't have any art yet, but I do think trying to add some sound and graphics as early as possible greatly helps, even if they have been ripped from other games for the time being.

There is a more general lesson here as well. This post was just about graphics and audio, but I think the prototyping method always influences the outcome. Paper prototyping, prototyping in editors from other games: always keep in mind that the prototyping method used has some kind of influence on the outcome!

PS. Woohoo, Proun has been nominated for the Dutch Game Awards in a whopping three categories: Best Visual Design, Best Original Game Design and Best Audio Design & Music! Incredibly cool! Only one other game was nominated in that many categories: Killzone 3. That is one really big and really good game, so it is an honour to get the same number of nominations! However, since Killzone 3 was developed by something like 200 people, and Proun by only two, Proun has a hundred times more nominations per person than Killzone 3! [insert evil laughter here] Some other awesome games that got nominations are Radical Fishing (by our neighbours Vlambeer) and Gatling Gears.